


no home like the one you've got ('cause that home belongs to you)

by wintercreek



Series: ATA Sorority [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Community: sga_flashfic, F/F, Fraternities & Sororities, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-04
Updated: 2009-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:49:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintercreek/pseuds/wintercreek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(More of) The one where they're sorority girls. A little moving out, a lot of moving in, and some coming home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no home like the one you've got ('cause that home belongs to you)

**Author's Note:**

> For the Wish Fulfillment Challenge at [sga_flashfic](http://community.livejournal.com/sga_flashfic/). Neither I nor this fic have any affiliation with the real Alpha Tau Alpha, which is an agricultural education organization.

Joan thinks of herself as an easy-to-please girl in a lot of ways, so it's a new thing for her when she starts wishing for housing that's just a bit better than what she's got. Freshman year she moves three times - once at the start, once at the semester to get away from her assigned roommate, and then out of the dorm and back in to her parents' house. Half her stuff is in storage in the ATA house and the other half she doesn't really want out on display. One month into the summer Joan determines that she'll never be moving back in with her folks again. Every habit she acquired at college comes out wrong under her mother's eye, and none of the space is hers. Joan wishes for a different caustic voice all summer and learns about internships and subletting, reads James Herriot and dreams of Yorkshire farms and RAF fighter planes. She promises herself it'll be different from here on out - better.

*

Sophomore year has, miracle of miracles, just one move-in and one move-out. Joan's already hauled up her boxes from the ATA basement and tacked up a poster when Meredith arrives at their room in September.

"Johnny _Cash?!_"

Joan has a private theory that Meredith is on a quest to bring back the interrobang, because no other punctuation mark can properly convey the sort of skeptical outrage Mer uses on a daily basis. "I missed you too, Mer."

"Oh, don't smirk at me, you shameless hussy. Come help me carry these boxes."

It's gross misrepresentation to call Joan's expression a smirk, but she doesn't call Meredith on it. Instead she gamely spirals down the staircase and in to the basement, again and again, until they've hauled Meredith's boxes up to their third floor double. They push the heads of their beds together in a cozy right angle, Mer's bed stretched out under the sill of their bay window and Joan's along the interior wall. Two weeks in to the term, Meredith will already have books piled so high on the sill that Joan almost won't be able to open the window.

Room 302 is theirs, no doubt about it, mingling Johnny Cash and Bryan Adams with a massive copy of the periodic table and time-lapse photos of jets taking off. Joan had been smugly unrolling [her poster](http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh266/wintercreeklj/joanposter.jpg) when Meredith exhaled happily and said "Joan, come look at [this poster](http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh266/wintercreeklj/merposter.jpg)." Once Joan got over her fit of the giggles and Meredith stopped snorting into her hands, they closed and locked the door and made out in the dappled light falling through the window.

"I think you're my _braintwin_," Mer whispers, casting a glance back to the jet posters.

Joan, suddenly shy, nuzzles her nose behind Mer's ear. She inhales the scent of Meredith's hair and breathes softly, "I think we're meant for each other."

*

By junior year they have a system. Meredith supervised their packing for maximum efficiency last spring, so unpacking and setting up their new room in the ATA house is a breeze. After a summer of subletting a one-bedroom apartment, a double room in a sorority house should feel small to Joan; it doesn't. They have a coveted second floor room, with a tiny metal landing outside one set of windows like a fire escape to nowhere. Joan reads Shakespeare on it as the sun goes down golden, and Meredith eyes it suspiciously for weeks before stepping out on to it.

They play music constantly. Instrumental music is for studying, always, and lyrics are saved for times when they need their energy up, like when Meredith spends what Joan considers one truly regrettable month playing "Eye of the Tiger" before every exam. They try to surprise each other. Joan discovers bluegrass music that way; something about the sound of a mandolin makes her math homework sparkle.

They know, by this point, just how thin the house walls are. Even with one bed along an exterior wall they have to be quiet when they mess around. Joan loves to bring Meredith _this close_ to losing control and then, when she's almost a babbling mess, to kiss her soundly and swallow down the words and the moans together. It's sort of like taking in the essence of Meredith; one gentlefirm hand in her hair and one hand curled between Mer's legs, Joan drags her tongue over Meredith's moving lips and waits for them to go still. She imagines all those words slipping from Meredith's brilliant brain to Joan's clever mouth, pretends she can feel each syllable taking root somewhere in her rib cage. It's then, when those beloved lips are quiet, that Joan shifts her balance and slides two fingers in to Meredith, moves her thumb just so. Meredith clenches around Joan's fingers as she arcs her back, panting silently. It should make Joan proud to see Meredith McKay - fastest talker at Pegasus, who once showed up at the Undergraduate Symposium and shredded an honors physics thesis before the guy taking questions even knew what was going on - rendered speechless by Joan's prowess. She wonders, though, what Meredith really sounds like in private. As Meredith reaches for Joan and starts to roll them over, Joan makes a quick wish on a glow-in-the-dark star that one day she'll get to hear Mer as she could be.

*

Senior year they get a little apartment off campus. It's in the basement of an old house, and Meredith swears that it's dusty and dark, liable to lead to asthma attacks and vitamin D deficiencies and probably scurvy, to which Joan can only raise an eyebrow and repeat, "_Scurvy?_" It _is_ a little dark, with only small windows up near the ceiling to let in the natural light, but it's blessedly cool in the late summer heat. They get the futon assembled in the living room last of that first day, having followed Meredith's ironclad priority list (1. Meredith's bed. 2. Joan's bed. 3. Table and chairs. 4. Futon. 5. TV stand. 6. Desks, bookcases et cetera.) and stopped short after four. They watch a movie anyway, laid out on their sides on the futon, pizza box on the floor and TV just far enough away to be visible even though it's on the carpet. Joan falls asleep there, but Meredith wakes her at the end of the movie and leads her sleepily by the hand to the back bedroom.

The best part, Joan thinks muzzily, about Meredith's family tendency to back problems is the really excellent mattress Mer's folks bought her. It has proper support and all that junk; more importantly, it's a _queen pillowtop_ and it doesn't smell funny like the old full mattress Joan picked up at a garage sale. Mer's bed has a box spring _and_ a frame, which is why it took so long to set up and why they had to do it first. "We have to be fresh for this one!" Mer had cried. "A mattress frame is _not_ the kind of thing you can assemble half asleep!" Joan had cracked some jokes about how they'd hardly be doing much _sleeping_ on this mattress, and Meredith, obviously torn, had gotten the mattress cover and sheets on faster than any human had the right to and pulled Joan down in to a kiss almost as hot as the August afternoon outside. They didn't have any glow-in-the-dark stars up here yet, but Joan got last year's wish anyway - Meredith's babble had come to a halt, like always, and to Joan's surprise what replaced it here in the quiet private of their own apartment was a keening noise that urged Joan on. Joan thought, and still thinks, she wouldn't mind paying rent _or_ living in a basement if it means Meredith will make that noise, or others, every time. It had been a struggle to return to the work of unpacking and furniture assembly when it meant untangling their languid limbs and pulling their jeans and t-shirts back on, but Mer had insisted.

Now Joan stands patiently by the side of the bed as Meredith turns down the hypoallergenic cotton sheets and climbs in. At Mer's impatient snort - there's no other word for it - Joan comes fully back to herself and shucks off her jeans. Her shirt is smelly from a day of sweaty lifting and assembling, so she gives brief consideration to changing shirts or something. But it's so late, and she's so tired, so she settles for unhooking her bra with that sly one-handed behind-the-back move that Meredith _still_ hasn't figured out, pulls the bra out of her sleeve like a magic trick, and slides between the clean sheets. She's asleep almost before Meredith wraps herself around the curve of Joan's body and whispers, "Welcome home." Joan falls asleep smiling.

_Fin_


End file.
